by Evelyn James
“If I am not imposing,” Clara said.
“You are most welcome,” Emma pulled out a chair for Clara to sit in. “I know you are not looking into who killed John and, honestly, I don’t much care who was responsible, but I think Ruby would like to know. Could you keep an ear open for any information regarding that too, while you are solving Dr Browning’s mystery?”
“I will,” Clara promised. “As will the police.”
Emma Beasley looked relieved.
“Ruby doesn’t know how lucky she was you knocked at her door this morning,” Mrs Beasley leaned on the back of a chair with her hands. “Sometimes, everything works out for the best.”
Chapter Ten
After lunch, Clara and Harry Beasley headed down the road for the Hole in the Wall. Harry had explained that it was the sort of place where people who had nothing better to do hung around. Even though it was early, Harry was sure they would find some of John’s friends there. The customers at the Hole in the Wall rarely had jobs.
“John liked easy money,” Harry elaborated as they walked along. “He would do anything as long as it did not require much effort. I always suspected he dabbled in illegal activities, but I couldn’t ask.”
They reached the pub, which was stuck on a corner and resembled its name rather appropriately. It was a dirty, brown-brick building, with large dark windows and a gaping door. Next to the red-brick houses, it looked like a mucky smut. It made Clara think of a missing tooth in an otherwise pleasant smile. There was something about the grim looking pub that seemed to suck people in, like a bottomless pit. Passers-by made the effort to give it a wide berth, if they were not intending to actually go in.
Clara could see why Harry had insisted on coming with her. It was not a place where women would be welcomed as fellow drinkers. The women who went into the Hole in the Wall were there on business, but not the sort of respectable business Clara did. She suspected she would get a cold reception, and her questions would fall on deaf ears, but one had to try.
They walked through the door and Clara was instantly struck by a strong smell of alcohol and tobacco. The aroma was so dense, it almost had a physical presence. She also had not realised how dark the interior was until she stepped through the doorway and had to take a moment to get used to the dim light. When her eyes did adjust, she saw a small room with a bar against the back wall and round tables and chairs dotted about. There were a dozen drinkers filling the tight space. They were all men and looked at Clara with either disdain or lechery.
The landlord was behind his bar, picking up the pieces of a broken glass. He scowled as Harry and Clara approached.
“No women in the bar,” he said. “I’ve made it a rule. Too many tarts kept coming in. Police were starting to take an interest.”
“Do I look like a tart?” Clara asked him coolly.
“Takes all sorts,” the landlord sneered. He was in his later years, balding and with crooked, stained teeth. He also had a lazy eye, which was slightly off-putting, as it seemed as if he was looking two ways at once. “Some of them dress fancy.”
“Mind your tongue,” Harry rumbled.
“This your pimp?” The landlord regarded Harry without concern. “You two ought to be ashamed.”
Clara did not bother to get angry, the landlord was not worth the effort.
“I am a private detective,” she explained. “And I am here because of the murder of John Morley.”
She had raised her voice a fraction to ensure she got everyone’s attention. In the small pub, it was not hard to be overheard.
“John Morley is dead?” The landlord was thrown for a second. “He was only in here last night.”
“And now he is in the morgue, someone clobbered him over the head,” Clara added.
“Then why are you here and not the police?” The landlord sneered again.
“Would you prefer I fetch the police?” Clara challenged him. “I’m sure that would do your business the world of good.”
“Are you threatening me?” The landlord pointed a dirty finger at her.
“I haven’t even worked up to threatening you yet,” Clara grinned at him. “But if you insist, I shall gladly go get the police.”
The landlord was starting to bluster, he shook a piece of broken glass at her, at which point Harry grabbed his wrist.
“I am really taking offence to your manner,” he told the landlord in his deepest tone. Harry was big and muscular, working on a railway did that for a man. “Be nice to the lady, or must I teach you some manners.”
The landlord was a bully and, like so many men in his position, the second he was accosted by someone tougher than him he backed down. He dropped the shard of glass into a bucket behind the counter and moved back from the bar.
“You want to ask questions, fine. Don’t expect anyone to talk to you. And I ain’t serving you a drink, neither!”
Clara was relieved about that. She had no desire to drink the beer the landlord kept on tap. Instead she glanced to Harry.
“Any of these men friends of John’s?”
Harry looked around him and then motioned to a table to the side of the bar, where three men were sitting.
“I’ve seen him talking with those lot before now.”
Clara approached the trio, who eyed her with suspicion and clutched their drinks a little closer as if she was about to steal them.
“I am trying to find out what happened to John Morley last night. Did any of you see him yesterday?” Clara asked.
The men exchanged looks but remained sullenly silent.
“It is odd how a man’s friends can be so utterly uncaring about his death,” Clara remarked in a loud aside to Harry. “It is not as if I am accusing them of anything. Nor, for that matter, am I the police. All I want to know is if they saw John yesterday, not to get them into trouble, but to discover what happened to him.”
The men seemed to drop their heads in unison. One took an uneasy sip from his pint mug.
“You’ll have no luck,” Harry told Clara, shaking his head. “These men weren’t friends to Harry, not in the way you mean. They knew him, drank with him, but they don’t give a damn that he is dead.”
Clara tried to catch the eye of the men, but none were interested.
“Well then, this is a pickle. Let me lay out what I know for you, and maybe you will be inclined to help me then,” Clara placed her hands on the table and leaned forward, making it hard for them to ignore her. “John Morley came here last night for a drink. Someone approached him and offered him money to do a job. The job was to break into the town hall and smash the glass cases holding a certain fossil. Now, something happened while John was there, someone smacked him over the head with a mallet and killed him. Then they vanished into thin air. I’m not saying any of you were involved, but I want to know who hired John.”
The men were silent. Clara guessed they were all around John’s age, it was hard to tell in the semi-dark. She could only surmise why they were here drinking instead of working. Though one had lost an arm, which easily explained his circumstances. Clara wondered if he had been in the war, or whether the missing limb was a deformity.
“Really? You don’t want to help?” Clara was losing her patience. “What sort of friends are you?”
She rose up and looked to Harry.
“I give up, with this lot around there is no hope of getting any justice for John. I guess his killer will get to walk free, crowing about what he did.”
“I figured as much,” Harry shrugged. “This isn’t the place to make loyal friends.”
“You want to make a man feel guilty to his soul,” a voice behind Clara snarled.
She turned and saw that she had been addressed by the man with the missing arm.
“It’s not as though I killed him, how could I?” The man waved his singular hand. “I was right-handed before the war, can’t get used to being left-handed. I definitely can’t lift and swing a mallet.”
“I already said, I am not
accusing any of you of murder,” Clara replied.
“Why not?” The one-armed man declared. “Could be any of us done it. Maybe we went on the job with him? Well, not me, but one of these two.”
He waved a hand between the two men sitting either side of him.
“Shut up Frank!” The man on his right barked. “None of us left the pub until it was late, you know that. John was long gone by the time we went home.”
“I’m just saying,” Frank lifted up his pint and held it to his lips, “we all saw John pocket that money. We all thought about what we would do with it, if we had the chance.”
“Speak for yourself,” the man on his left grumbled. “I didn’t begrudge John that money.”
“I never said that, not as such,” Frank was holding forth now, enjoying tormenting his companions. “But we all thought about it. That was a lot of cash, and none of us are wealthy men.”
“Where did John get this money?” Clara interrupted.
Frank glared at her as if she had suddenly appeared before him and demanded he hand over his wallet.
“How do we know you ain’t something to do with it all? Maybe you are trying to get that money back?”
Clara laughed.
“The police have the money. Its locked up, considered evidence in their case,” she shrugged. “I am truly here to discover what happened last night and who hired John Morley.”
“Who are you working for, then?” The man on Frank’s right asked her. He was missing his front upper teeth and stuck his tongue out a little when he talked.
“Dr Browning,” Clara answered.
The men all looked blank, as she had expected.
“He is one of the people in charge of the exhibition of fossils in the town hall,” Clara added.
She received further uncomprehending stares and almost groaned aloud.
“John Morley was murdered trying to smash one of the cases in the exhibition. Looks like someone paid him to do it.”
The three men exchanged looks.
“It was that fellow in the dark suit,” the man to the left of Frank whispered to his companions. He didn’t do a very good job of masking his words from Clara. “He was talking to John for ages, and then John pocketed that money he gave him.”
“I reckoned he was trouble as soon as I saw him,” the man on Frank’s right added. “He looked too smartly dressed to be coming in here. I thought he was up to no good.”
“Are you saying that fellow killed John?” Frank asked aloud.
His companions glanced at one another.
“Well, none of us went with John, did we? So, who else?”
Frank looked morose for a second, then he glanced at Clara.
“You just want to know who hired John?”
“Yes,” Clara said.
“Well, it was a man in a dark suit,” Frank repeated what he had just discussed with the others. “He had a pencil moustache and black hair.”
“You don’t know his name,” Clara tried not to sigh in exasperation. What a waste of her time!
“He wasn’t for introducing himself to us,” Frank took offence at her tone. “He looked like someone who works in an office, or something.”
“He wore a really nice pin,” the man to Frank’s right recalled. “It looked like a bird. He wore it on his lapel, like it meant something. It was gold, I reckon.”
“More likely gold-plate,” Frank scoffed. “He weren’t that rich looking.”
“He spoke odd, strange accent,” the man on Frank’s left remarked. “Sounded foreign. But not like the foreign accents of the French or Belgians I met in the war.”
“No, he weren’t from there,” the man opposite concurred. “If you ask me, he was Irish.”
“No!” Frank looked at his friends in horror. “That accent was South African, sure of it. I knew a man from South Africa in the war. He had faced the Boers.”
“South Africans have a lot of gold,” the man who had mentioned the gold pin muttered this under his breath.
“What’s a South African doing here?” The man on Frank’s left snapped. “Thinking about it, he could have been Scottish.”
Clara was becoming exasperated. Instead of helping her, the men were causing only further confusion. Whoever this man with the gold pin and peculiar accent was, she was going to get no more from the gentlemen in the pub about him.
“Let’s go,” she said to Harry. “Thank you gentlemen.”
She nodded to the drinkers around the table and turned away with Harry.
“Do you think that fellow killed John?” Frank called from behind her.
Clara turned back.
“It would be odd to hire a man just to kill him,” she observed.
The three men put their heads together and talked in low voices. Then Frank looked up.
“You see, we heard the man tell John that he would only give him the rest of the money for the job after it was over, and that he would come back to the pub the next day, which would be tonight, to meet with John and settle up,” Frank seemed pleased with this nugget of information. “Seems to me, that fellow ought to be back here tonight as he agreed. He probably don’t know John is dead, right?”
“What time might he be here?” Clara asked.
“He came over around nine, last night,” Frank said. “And, if you ask me, John knew he was coming. He was looking out for him. They had met before. I should have been more alert to that at the time.”
Frank’s face fell.
“John has drunk with me these last five years. Who am I going to drink with now?”
“You got us, Frank,” his companion on his right said.
“You? You can’t hold your drink! Anyway, soon as you get another job you will not be here, will you? You have that wife of yours nagging at you to make money. Never thinking about me, about how lonely I get.”
“Now Frank…”
“Don’t ‘now Frank’ me. I know how it is. I can’t work, can I? All I’ve got is this pub, but you all want to up and leave me!”
Clara moved to Harry and nodded her head to the door.
“We’re done here.”
As they left the pub Harry spoke.
“Will you come back tonight?”
“Yes, but I shall bring company with me, don’t worry,” Clara smiled at his concern. “Thank you for helping me today.”
Harry shrugged.
“I did it for Ruby, not for John. I knew he would always come to a bad end. Quite frankly, I wish it had been sooner,” Harry doffed his hat to her and then walked away, heading for his home.
Clara watched him go, mulling over his last words. Railway workers had access to some very hefty mallets.
Chapter Eleven
Tommy had arrived at O’Harris’ house in time for lunch. Victor Darling was already there and had had a full tour around the car collection, followed by being shown around the house. O’Harris’ Convalescence Home for Wounded Servicemen was slightly revolutionary in its methods for healing the mental scars of its patients. For a start, they weren’t called patients, they were guests and the house could almost be mistaken for a very upper-class hotel. There was no hint of a hospital about it. No bleached floors, or stark rooms. Everything was cosy and homely. That was part of the therapy. These men needed to integrate back into the real world, not be further removed from it by being treated in a ward with white-coated orderlies and nurses.
Each guest had their own room which was well appointed and furnished. They could spend as much or as little time within it as they wanted. The only exception was at mealtimes, when everyone was to come together in the elegant dining room. O’Harris worked on the basis that the men who came to him wanted to be helped and would work with him, they had not been forced there, they were paying to be healed. He didn’t think they would opt to spend their time at the home in their bedroom, but he wanted it to be a place of sanctuary for them, so they could retreat to it at any time they needed to.
The men’s day was arranged
around a schedule of therapy and personal time. This was unique to the individual. Men booked appointments with the doctors at the home, who would sit with them and go through their problems to find solutions. These doctors had been deliberately chosen for their forward-thinking attitudes, and their skills as psychologists. Ideally guests would arrange regular sessions with the doctors, but it was their choice, like everything at the home. Throughout the day there were opportunities to participate in various activities. Work therapy was considered especially helpful, and the men could work in the garden, or learn new skills in the workshops O’Harris had built behind the house. Various lecturers came in over the course of the week to teach everything from carpentry to physics, exercising the men’s minds as a way of overcoming their demons.
O’Harris had opened his car collection up as part of the mechanics and engineering courses on offer. The men could tinker with an engine, learn the science behind its functionality, or just how to change the oil. There was also plenty of leisure time for the men to play cricket or tennis on the old courts. Men could just go for a stroll, if they wished, or spend time in the library reading. O’Harris had plans for starting other activities, especially for the winter months when outdoor sports were going to be less of an option. He was hoping to turn the old hangar where he had once housed his aeroplane, The White Buzzard, into a theatre and have the men rehearse and put on plays. It would be a good way of inviting the public into the home and learning more about its function. For O’Harris was not blind to the fact that some of the local population were worried about his establishment. They thought it was full of madmen, lunatics who knew how to fire a gun, and that they were all destined to be murdered in their beds. It was a challenging assumption to overcome.
O’Harris was happy to regale Victor with all this information and his future plans as they walked about. Victor, in turn, was intrigued and had had his head turned by all the cars in the big garage behind the house. He could hardly imagine what it was like to be able to tinker with them all day, every day. He was still looking a little star-struck when Tommy arrived.